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Children at the Border

Children from Juticalpa, Honduras in Tenosique, Mexico, trying to get to Miami. May 30, 2014.Credit Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

More than a few online commenters were annoyed, angered or exasperated by an editorial last week, “Children on the Run,” which told of the recent surge of tens of thousands young migrants being caught at the southern border. These children, many of them traveling alone, are straining the Border Patrol’s resources and prompting the Obama administration to take urgent steps to ease what looks to us like a refugee crisis, but to others like an invasion.

It’s a terrible situation, and the editorial offered no easy answers, though it urged the administration to protect these children, many of whom are fleeing murderous drug-and-gang violence in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, and to closely examine their cases for asylum.
The editorial also criticized Republicans, particularly the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Bob Goodlatte, for exploiting the crisis to attack President Obama’s immigration policies.

Many critical commenters seized on this line:

The crisis comes at a bad moment in America’s stalemated immigration debate, with Republicans gleefully seizing on a situation seemingly tailored to fit their false narrative, that any reform short of an aggressively militarized border will create yet another magnet to pull more of the wretched poor over our border, and that all the chaos in the system is Mr. Obama’s fault.

I don’t get what “false narrative” the NYT refers to here. Is there anybody, anybody with over a 60 I.Q. that doubts that if we don’t aggressively deport those who are pouring over the border now, because of the current crisis the NYT refers to, that it WON’T “create another magnet” to stir further illegal border crossings? What am I missing here? If these people possess eyes and ears they will see others being successful and try themselves, right? Surely the NYT editorial board possesses the requisite intelligence to understand this fundamental action/reaction equation?

Another commenter wrote:

Is the purpose of the US to solve the nightmarish problems of the overpopulated third world, from Central America to the Central African Republic? From Syria to the Ukraine? We need to let the rest of the world work on their own solutions; we need to help our own unemployed, uninsured, imprisoned, mentally ill, foreclosed, evicted, etc. first and foremost. We have failed utterly to lift up our own citizens. Let the rest of the world lift their own up.

And another:

The murder rate in Tegucigalpa or problems in Latin America is not our responsibility. This editorial like much of the discussion of this issue is frankly surreal. Yes, we could seal the border if we so choose. And if we were having a sane discussion, we would do so. Put the 82d airborne to work down there instead of in Afghanistan. The US cannot import tens of millions of people.

These critics raise important questions:

What is America’s responsibility to those beyond our borders who are dislocated by poverty and violence? (None? If so, then what do we do when they show up at the border anyway? And do we want to treat trafficked children the same as drug smugglers and other criminals?)

What are the magnetic factors that pull people here, and how can they be managed? (A news article in The Times said many Central Americans who were interviewed believed that the Obama administration had loosened tough deportation policies, particularly involving children.)

It seems reasonable to conclude that some parents in violence-wracked countries, looking for a safe place for their children to flee, may look at a map and say: the United States, of course. And smugglers known as “coyotes” may now be telling customers with children that they will be safe from deportation if they make it over the border, whether or not that is true.

And yet to blame Mr. Obama entirely for the crisis, as Republicans have done, is to ignore the powerful forces pushing migrants to leave. The United Nations has reported that the outflow began to surge in 2011, well before Obama administration programs like the one deferring deportations of thousands young unauthorized immigrants. And many of those fleeing are going not to the United States but to other relatively safe countries, like Belize and Costa Rica.

Although we don’t agree with the commenters above, we share their longing for simple, clean, cheap solutions.

But the most frequent suggestion offered by the other side – adding still more boots, fencing and drones on the 2,000-mile southern border, to make America impenetrable — is a delusion. So is passing laws, as Arizona and Alabama did, to make life here for unauthorized immigrants more unbearable than it ever was in Guatemala or El Salvador. That strategy – to force millions to go back, or never to even try to come, through the steady application of misery – even has a name: “attrition through enforcement.” It’s popular in right-wing circles, but it doesn’t work, and it reflects a short-sighted cruelty toward outsiders that is defiantly un-American.

Despite its professed immigrant ideals, the United States regularly has fits when poor foreigners show up unexpectedly in large numbers — Vietnamese, Haitians, Cubans, Central Americans.

It’s not clear how or when the current crisis will be resolved, though the administration has been right to move quickly to house and protect the children as it prepares to deport them – and it seems clear that most will be sent home. We hope the furor does not scare the Obama administration into backing off its promise to make the deportation system “more humane,” or to shrink from the need to reduce needless deportations of nonviolent, noncriminal immigrants. It would compound a tragedy if Mr. Obama’s critics exploit this crisis to kill off immigration reform. The legislation now stalled in Congress is the best hope for easing the chaos at the border, by creating a safe, legal path for some of these children to reunite with their families.

And we hope there will be a larger, more thoughtful discussion of the United States’ responsibility for its immigration-related problems. Years of increasingly stringent enforcement have trapped millions of immigrants within America’s borders — people who don’t want to leave because they fear they won’t be able to come back. These families have powerful reasons to try to reunite with their children.

The festering absence of immigration reform — along with America’s huge demand for drugs has spurred the very smuggling pipelines that are sending children to the border today.

And the United States has for decades played a key role in fomenting violence in Latin America, involving itself in civil unrest and oppression.

The immigration debate seldom considers the world beyond our borders, or Americans’ responsibility for bringing many of these problems on ourselves. These are complicated questions, and it’s these very complications that so often bring the discussion to a standstill.